Ben Connor '25

Spring 2025

PDF available with citations and footnotes here

Introduction

Oregon was founded with racially exclusive laws on the books. The state hoped to sidestep the issue of slavery by simply prohibiting Black residents from entering the state with explicitly exclusionary laws in the constitution of the state which were not fully repealed until 1926 (L. Davis, 1972). The historical impact of these laws, combined with open hostility and segregationist policies aimed at minorities, succeeded in making Oregon a majority white state. Explicit racial exclusion evolved into more subtle discrimination via redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and the displacement of Black communities through public works and urban renewal projects. Portland exists as it does today because of these laws and the discrimination that followed — notably, of the 40 largest cities in America, it is the whitest (de Leon & Friesen, 2022). 

The destruction of the Albina neighborhood in Portland by the construction of I-5 is one of the most egregious examples of the deliberate displacement of Black communities in Oregon. Though it was pitched as a project that would bring economic prosperity to the region, a closer look at the project and its impacts tie it directly to this lineage of racial exclusion and segregation. More than one thousand predominantly Black-owned homes were demolished, often to be replaced with nothing more than empty space, while the neighborhoods on either side of the construction that were promised economic growth received higher levels of pollution, capital flight, and asthma instead (R. Davis, 2023; Moseson, 2021). To address these impacts, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has a legal and moral obligation to spend the funding allocated by the federal government for highways on mitigation projects that it has failed to complete in the past.

Background

Understanding the construction of I-5 requires situating it in the broader context of laws and policies in Oregon that followed the abolition of explicit racial exclusion — namely, redlining and urban renewal projects. In 1919, Portland’s Realty Board adopted broad and explicit policies that prohibited the sale of a home to non-white people on the belief that sales to non-white buyers lowered home values (City of Portland, 2018). This was also enforced by banks who were guided by the Federal Housing Authority’s creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1933 (FDR Presidential Library and Museum, 2012). The HOLC created Residential Security Maps that designated categories of risk for investment, largely based on home value and the racial makeup of the neighborhood (Ajibade et al., 2022). As a result, banks refused to lend to non-white people attempting to buy homes in predominantly white communities in order to preserve property values. In addition to impacting bank lending activity, the HOLC encouraged homeowners to place racially-restrictive covenants on their homes by giving neighborhoods with such covenants higher ratings. As a result, Black residents who came to Portland during the Second World faced a dramatically segregated housing market and had to live in neighborhoods like Albina (Schechter, 2023; Walter, 2024).

The story of redlining, however, is not limited to exclusion. The HOLC’s maps discouraged investment in majority-minority communities, which decimated Black communities by making mortgages impossible to acquire and encouraged home abandonment (Lynch et al., 2021). These policies ultimately led to the urban renewal programs that destroyed these communities all together (Lynch et al., 2021). Take the region the HOLC calls “D2 Lower Albina” as shown in Richmond University’s “Mapping Inequality” and shown in image 1 below (Harris & Winling, 2023). Labeled as grade D, the region was a multi-family residential and business district that housed 2/3 of Portland’s black population in the 1950s (Harris & Winling, 2023). The HOLC report complains of “subversive races infiltrating” and states that it expects the value of this region to only go downward due to dilapidated homes, calling it the “nearest approach to a ‘slum district’ in the city” (Harris & Winling, 2023). In 1962, the Portland Development Commission conducted a study that stated that Central Albina was in a stage of advanced blight, and argued that clearance was the only solution to avoid the spread of blight to other surrounding areas (Ackerman, 2016). 

Issue Analysis

The Broadway Bridge on the HOLC map leads into a cluster of residential neighborhoods with what the HOLC report describes as schools, churches, transportation, recreational areas and trading centers (Harris & Winling, 2023). Today, the Broadway Bridge connects to Interstate 5, passing by several large city-planned commercial developments (Google Maps, 2024). The interstate cuts directly through where the HOLC map said this neighborhood existed. Surrounding the interstate, where the neighborhood used to be, are two parking garages, a variety of standalone parking lots, a hospital, the headquarters for the Portland School District, the Moda Center, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and the Oregon Convention Center. All of these were planned by the city and came at the cost of those living in Albina. 

As ODOT created I-5, the consequences were immense. The project went forward over the objections of residents and community organizations which warned of the displacement that would occur (ODOT, 2023a). All told, by the time I-5 was completed in 1966, over one thousand homes and dozens of businesses were demolished (R. Davis, 2023). Between 1960 and 1970, Albina lost over half of its residents (City of Portland, 2018). Media justification at the time was both racist and classist, with the Oregonian praising the designers of I-5 for avoiding high income neighborhoods and writing that “some blame a lack of individual initiative by Albina home dwellers, [while] some see the blight as an inescapable consequence of low-income, uneducated families with little aspiration” (R. Davis, 2023).

I-5 was one of several urban renewal projects that decimated Albina. Portland residents voted to build the Memorial Coliseum in central Albina and the city allowed Emanuel Hospital to demolish over 200 homes to facilitate an expansion project. These projects were not placed through Albina by happenstance — they were part of a systematic campaign to push minorities out of Portland and destroy the places where they lived. 

Proposed Solution

While this damage was done decades ago, the question of how to proceed remains. For the last 50 years the answer has been simple: do nothing. There has been some rhetoric — while proposing an expansion of the I-5 corridor, ODOT did recognize the harms that it created during the initial construction — but there have been no substantial action taken to create new homes or protect residents still living nearby from the pollutants created by the freeway (Deml, 2024). Despite this inaction, the residents still living in Albina have continued to call for rebuilding affordable housing in the neighborhood and covering the highway to reduce noise and air pollution (ODOT, 2023b). The funding for these projects could come from a variety of sources including the city, state, or federal legislature. There is one uniquely feasible solution, however, that capitalizes on existing funding sources and reroutes them toward restorative goals: using federal highway money to mitigate the impacts of the construction of I-5. 

These steps toward remediation would broadly help those most hurt by the construction of I-5, but would come at the cost of landlords and car-based commuters. Rebuilding affordable housing in Albina, for example, would have substantial benefits for current residents of Portland in the form of lower rents, but could potentially hurt existing landlords as construction of these units reduces housing prices. Rebuilding this neighborhood would also limit the impact of gentrification and reduce the rate of rent increase, potentially allowing marginalized residents to move back into the neighborhood. While this decline in rising rents would hurt landlords, given the recent rise in rents in Portland, they would likely be able to bear this burden (Gebel, 2024). Similar to the big dig in Boston, covering the highway would have substantial health and walkability benefits for those living near the areas the highway currently goes through, but it would cost a substantial amount of money (Bushouse, 2002). Finally, sourcing funding for mitigation from federal highway funding would be a direct trade off between highways and the communities these highways have impacted in the past. For urbanists opposed to highways in the first place, as well as the communities displaced by the highway, this tradeoff would be well worth it, but car-using commuters who rely on these highways would bear the brunt of these changes. 

Strategic Recommendations

The path forward is clear — there are a variety of projects in desperate need of funding, and a funding source intended to finance projects that mitigate the impacts of highway construction. ODOT receives $700 million each year from the Federal Highway Administration and is permitted to use that money to build highways and mitigate the impacts of that construction (ODOT, 2024). In fact, there is a record of mitigation projects conducted with federal money — the Texas Department of Transportation committed to using $27 million of federal funds to build affordable housing in the neighborhoods most affected by the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (Arrajj, 2023). The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Environmental Justice policy requires that “no population, due to policy or economic disempowerment, is forced to bear a disproportionate burden of the negative human health and environmental impacts… resulting from transportation decisions,” a statement which should be read as requiring action from ODOT to right historical wrongs (Office of the Secretary of Transportation, 2021).

The first priority for this funding should be rebuilding the demolished housing stock and increasing the supply of affordable housing in order to decrease the bite of gentrification and repair what was taken from these communities. From there, federal funding should be directed towards covering the highway, mitigating the health impacts of the current car-dependent system.

Conclusion

The recommendations provided in this paper are uniquely feasible as they could be implemented by ODOT unilaterally. The mediations proposed are widely popular in Portland, with the main downsides being their cost, meaning that overcoming the cost barrier with federal funding is a substantial step towards action. Black residents in Portland were explicitly excluded from the state, forced into specific neighborhoods, cut off from the home loans that revitalized white neighborhoods after the Second World War, then displaced from their homes via urban renewal projects, and are now being priced out of their neighborhoods through gentrification. Using the funds provided by the federal government for highways, ODOT can and must mitigate the historical impacts of the construction of I-5, providing historically marginalized neighborhoods with the opportunity to rebuild and flourish.